I'm not going to take too long a time to write this, because it's just too disheartening.
I like Dave Trembley. I think he's a good guy. More than that, I think he generally has control of this team: the players like him, they hustle for him (for the most part), he has handled controversy well. He was asked point-blank before the game about Jamie Walker's status and he practically said out loud that Walker will be DFA'd tomorrow, instead of giving some generic BS answer. I don't personally pine for John Gibbons to run this team.
But Dave has one massive, glaring weak spot: he is obsessed with smallball bunting and hit-and-runs. OBSESSED!
This, on a team that can't run the bases worth a pile of resin. So, on a night when Nolan Reimold got picked off of first and Aubrey Huff got picked off of third, the story of the game was not the Orioles' ridiculous baserunning errors. Granted, it's clear that this team needs A LOT of work on the fundamentals in that department.
No, the story tonight was that the Orioles had four, count them, FOUR failed hit-and-runs. Two of them involved "speedster" Aubrey Huff as the lead runner.
It is often said that a manager only loses two to three games a year all by himself. Tonight, Diamond Dave did just that, wasting yet another quality start by Brad Bergesen. The Mariners won in the bottom of the ninth on a Beltre single (the guy really woke up against us) after running themselves out of about a thousand chances to take a decent lead.
It's fun to joke around when your team has lost for eleven years and it's a weeknight west coast game against a crappy team. But it sure is not fun to watch your team lose four out of five when they had just won five straight and they clearly, clearly should have had this game in the bag.
It's the kind of thing that can make the kids on the roster think the team is snakebit. Which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are used to mediocrity in Baltimore, and that's not a good thing. You can damn betcha there are other towns where ineptitude on this level would be all over the news after the game.
I didn't see the presser after the game. But I hope the media tomorrow will grill Dave long and hard about his decisions. I hope he really starts to think about his in-game management. Because once the horses are there, if he keeps doing bush league stuff like this, he's going to ruin any chance this team has of becoming respectable again.